Here’s an interesting answer to a question that my friend Corrine Nadolny has just sent to me via email.

According to Corrine, who is a consultant for Paychex payroll processing, she was being asked by her customers:

Some CPA’s and clients have asked, if businesses were closed last week due to power outages and hourly employees were available to work but couldn’t, do they still have to be paid? Or should they collect? If the employer offers them extra hours to make up the lost hours, do they have to pay OT?

To which Corrine say’s that she called the CT Department of Labor and received this response:

I just called the Dept of Labor: Exempt ee’s have to be paid

Non-exempt employees: Do not have to be paid, they have the right to collect If they work more than 40 hours to make up the time, they have to be paid 1.5 X Comp time is illegal for non-exempt ee’s

Paychex’s contingency plan was tested again and payrolls were processes last week without missing a beat! If any of your clients had difficulty with their payroll processing and need help, please ask them to contact me directly.

Tip: Always check with your own tax provider about these types decisions. The information on our web site is general in nature and may not apply to your company’s particular situation. We are not in the business of providing tax or accounting advice and make not guarantee about the reliability of the above information.

This morning I received a somewhat confusing email from my local Paychex representative. The subject line of “QuickBooks May Be Discontinued” caught my attention.

There was no message in the body of the email, however, attached was a graphic (see below) that stated QuickPayroll was being discontinued.

Sensing that something wasn’t right and that there’s no way that QuickBooks was going to be discontinued I contacted Intuit for their feedback.

As it turns out the notification, sent by my local Paychex representative, was only partially correct.

QuickBooks Payroll is not being phased out.

An older low-end version product called QuickPayroll is being discontinued in favor of any of Intuit’s other three payroll processing options.

With over 1.2 million payroll customers there’s a slim chance that Intuit’s going to turn their back on the payroll market. In July of 2009 Intuit actually increased their presence in the payroll market with a $170 million acquisition of Paycycle which also brought 85,000 additional small business payrolls under their arm.

Here is Intuit’s response:

Discontinuation of QuickPayroll

As of December 31, 2009, Intuit will discontinue its stand-alone QuickPayroll, a very basic payroll service that did not require the use of QuickBooks. We have notified the QuickPayroll customers (http://payroll.intuit.com/support/kb/kbitem/1012532.html) and have provided them with two offerings so that customers can continue their payroll services with Intuit. With its advertising,

So rest assured that QuickBooks and QuickBooks Payroll are both alive and well. While we don’t offer services on the Intuit product we wanted to provide this update for any users who might have received the same type of email with mis-information about the status of QuickBooks Payroll.

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